{"id":19140,"date":"2018-10-23T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=19140"},"modified":"2018-10-22T15:53:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T15:53:24","slug":"alien-the-illustrated-story-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2018\/10\/23\/alien-the-illustrated-story-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Alien: The Illustrated Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"
\nBy Archie Goodwin<\/strong> & Walter Simonson<\/strong>, from a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon<\/strong> and a story by Dan O’Bannon<\/strong> & Ronald Shusett<\/strong> (Heavy Metal\/Futura)
\nISBN: 978-0-93036-842-5\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 978-1-78116-595-9 (Titan Books Facsimile 2012)<\/p>\n

Alien<\/strong> was released in 1979 and utterly redefined the science fiction cinema genre. It pretty much did the same for horror stories too.<\/p>\n

Creeping in on the back of the jolly adventuring romps of the Star Wars<\/strong> phenomenon and its shiny, happy, Valerian<\/strong> rip-offs<\/span> \u00e2\u20ac\u0153homages\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, Dan O’Bannon’s dark tale and Ridley Scott’s grimly meticulous vision reintroduced the vital element of apocalyptic terror that had been absent from the medium since the headiest, most utterly paranoiac days of 1950s B-Movies.<\/p>\n

You know the plot: a bunch of interstellar miners are diverted by their untrustworthy bosses to a lost planet where they find an extraterrestrial shipwreck. One of the humans is infected by something uncanny and beyond the explorers’ meagre imaginings and brings aboard a ghastly killer that grows and hides and changes. Picking off the crew one by one, it cannot be stopped, escaped from or killed\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Lots of films have had comics adaptations: good bad or indifferent. Very few have ever come as close to capturing the stunning, senses-overloading feel – rather than the plot or look or detail – of the source material, although all of those too are well-catered for in this slim but superb graphic extravaganza from the award-winning creative team of Archie Goodwin & Walt Simonson (see Manhunter: The Special Edition<\/strong> for perhaps their ultimate moment of comics collaboration).<\/p>\n

Spectacular, engrossing, visually innovative (in both storytelling and lettering\/calligraphic effects) and absolutely absorbing, this hard-to-find gem – either in the original US edition from Heavy Metal Productions, this mass-market UK edition from Futura, or any of the later reissues in a variety of formats and sizes – is a true landmark of comics, long overdue for a definitive release with plenty of bonus features and preferably only in the original large, square European Album format please\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 1979 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson, from a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and a story by Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett (Heavy Metal\/Futura) ISBN: 978-0-93036-842-5\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 978-1-78116-595-9 (Titan Books Facsimile 2012) Alien was released in 1979 and utterly redefined the science fiction cinema genre. It pretty much did the same for horror stories too. Creeping in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Alien: The Illustrated Story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,66,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adaptations","category-horror-stories","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-4YI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}